An idiosyncratic thing about my family is that we all do high-intensity weight training. I was the first to try it, then my mother-in-law started, then my husband Jamie, my sister Elizabeth, my parents and father-in-law. We’ve been doing it for well more than a decade, very consistently. In fact, not long before he died, my father’s poor performance during a weight-training session was one of the first signs that his health had taken a sharp turn for the worse. I’ve also convinced about fifty of my friends to do it. I’m such a fan of this highly efficient, effective form of exercise.

Anyway, we’re a little bit bonkers about weight-training in my family, so maybe it’s understandable that we’d push our daughters Eliza and Eleanor to do it, too. We wanted Eleanor to start doing it when she was just eight years old. (Don’t worry, I made sure she did it in a safe way for a young child.)

Back then, as I was explaining to Eleanor what this exercise was, and why we all did it, and why we wanted her to do it, she said something I never forgot.

She wasn’t very enthusiastic about the prospect, especially when I described the main feature of this kind of training: you lift a very heavy weight—one at the outer limit of your capacity—and do repetitions until you can’t do anymore, which is about 8-15 repetitions. This approach is called “working to failure,” and it’s very challenging.

She listened to me, then she said in a resigned, self-encouraging way, “It will be hard, but after a while it will get easier.”

And I had to say to her, “No, honey, it’s always as hard as it can possibly be. The point of this kind of exercise is it never gets easier. But you get stronger.”

And I’ve realized that many thing in life are this way. Parenting, job promotions, volunteer projects. They don’t get easier, but we get stronger.